Bandages
by Grigori Dawn
Summary: Until she met him, there was nobody who would bandage her wounds except herself. (Soul x Maka, SoMa Week 2014)


_**A/N:** Written for SoMa Week 2014. Prompt was "bandages." I'm really terrible at coming up with titles, as you can see. Sorry._

_Update 6/18/16: Fixed an embarrassing amount of typos._

—**Bandages**—

She'd always been getting herself into fights when she was younger. But for the part of her childhood that hadn't been sullied with late-night arguments, slamming doors, and the scent of unfamiliar perfume leached deep into her father's clothes, she was an angel of a child—admittedly rougher and more assertive than the rest of the children her age and a little more well-suited with the boys than with the girls, but sweet-hearted and kind nonetheless. But although everyone knew of her dream to become a scythemeister like her renowned mother and fight demons and other horrors, nobody had expected her first wounds to come from her own parents.

On days when they were out on those important missions they'd never tell her about, she'd walk around with ribbons in her hair, fingers laced loosely behind her back as she pranced around the city she'd proudly called her home, thinking to herself with a bright smile on her face about how, one day, she would hunt kishin and collect souls just like her parents. The idea would always fill her with a kind of brightness particular only to her; she could imagine herself becoming a meister so powerful that demons would cower in fear at the slightest mention of her name, and she and her partner would be the best team the world had ever known, existing as one entity linked perfectly in soul and mind—just like her parents. She'd hear three words in her head captured in repeat even as the day sped on and the sun fell into sleep. Just like them, just like them.

It started when she'd hopped onto her father's lap one night and smelled something oddly foreign on his coat. She didn't understand why her parents had suddenly started fighting shortly thereafter, repeatedly and consistently, every day; eventually her mother's words of poison laced themselves into her mind and played on their own in a constant loop, a broken record of insults and swears. Elsewhere, her peers called her names, spread rumors about her. Even in youth, people were toxic, and she'd learned that quickly. The fights started. One after another, increasing in vigor and in damage each time just as her parents' were; first hair-pulling, the next day she'd pushed some kid into the moat in a flash of anger. Her parents never knew—fighting was what soul reapers do all the time, wasn't it?—and even if they did, they never took action. She didn't want to think they didn't care. They were her parents, she had reasoned; they love her, and despite all the arguing and fighting, they would never do anything to hurt her or jeopardize the welfare of the family; they were still together, just as one unit, and whoever tried to persuade her otherwise was wrong. She'd prove it to them in the only way she knew how.

But as the days went on and her summers twisted cruelly into winter, she'd realized—with the sounds of shattered glass, muffled screams and distant sobbing—that no, they weren't the perfect team; she was wrong, they were wrong, everything was wrong. Often she found herself behind closed doors, windows draped to darkness, reading her books in a corner as best as she could with whatever dim light she could find in that cage she called her room. Her mother would always leave first after each argument, and their little angel, alone in her own sanctity, would always make sure that the door was locked tight so that her sad excuse of a father could never come in to disturb her. The cage was to keep him out, after all—the perfume on his jacket was always nauseatingly repugnant.

Some days, when she was tired and sore from getting into one too many fights, she'd walk straight past home and head to the fountain on the west side of town. Other times, she found herself in dark alleys artfully vandalized with graffiti or in the backs of bookstores in the sections that nobody bothered to look at. Regardless of the location, it had always been the same situation, and she'd tilt her head back and stare at whatever was above her, cloudy skies or ceilings the color of mustard—they were all irrelevant in the end. The ribbons fell from her hair, and her hands would work absently to soothe the cuts and bruises she'd acquired that day. They started small, just like all problems, but naturally they grew larger in stature deeper in pain alongside her parents' fights. And she knew she was safe, wherever she was, for her mom and dad had better things to worry about than bandaging their daughter's wounds.

It was when her mother filed for divorce that she realized, regardless of what they tried to tell her, that she really was of no considerable importance to them at all; she might have been a single thread holding together two ships pushed by waves in different directions. She'd concluded on one starless, dreamless night that it had all been her father's fault that their family was so broken, that all the cuts and scrapes on her skin were caused indirectly by his incompetence as both a parent and a husband. It was that same night that she resolved herself to get stronger—for her own sake, if nothing more; she'd find a partner and make them a Death Scythe even if it was the last thing she did, and, above all else, she would not repeat her parents' mistakes. She couldn't be just like them; in fact, she had to strive to do just the opposite. And the first step to making that possible, she thought, was finding a partner who wasn't of the same repulsive gender as her father.

At this point she had been labeled too tough for the girls but would not tolerate the company of any male. She refused to live with her father, so there was nowhere for her to go except for that peculiarly-designed skull castle at the top of the city, and thus she ruled that there was no better time to enroll at the Death Weapon Meister Academy. Her dad had always told her to wait until she was a little older, but whatever weight his words had carried before had faded along with her mother's goodbyes to the husband and daughter she left behind. She stepped through the doors of that great academy for the first time with newfound resolution and an unmistakable sense of hope in her soul that she hadn't felt in a long time. She tossed around ideas about her future partner in her mind as she aimlessly walked throughout the halls; she reestablished the fact that whoever they were, they'd have to be female, and she'd have to be strong, brave, cheerful, charismatic, kindhearted, generous. Every perfect quality wrapped up into one weapon.

And then all her expectations fell apart when she heard that piano play.

Though her Soul Perception hadn't yet advanced to anything of noteworthy power at that point, she could feel him through the keys, through the notes that seemed like they played themselves when he merely swept his hands over them. A small glimmer of hope was born in her heart in that moment—take him, _take him_, everything felt so right; perhaps he wasn't the perfect, cheerful partner she'd imagined, but then, perfect came in different forms, and his certain strain of darkness spoke to her soul in a way that no words could touch. She would give him a chance, she resolved. Just one.

But her mind tossed conflicts in her path; he was a boy, he knew nothing of loyalty, he would be the same as her father. In the days that followed, she had been skeptical of both him and the condition of her future—she'd put her faith in one man before, and all he proved to do was break not just her heart but her mother's as well. Her soul pushed otherwise: though he occasionally ridiculed her for her chest size or other petty details, they were ultimately words and nothing more, and she felt something different in him that she could never sense in any other male. With her soul and mind fighting for dominance, she kept her distance from him as much as their meister-weapon relationship would allow; when they weren't on missions together, she'd slip away and read a book or do something else in her own company. He was only her partner after all; the relationship was wholly and completely platonic—they worked as one only to fight evil, and after the fights they were separate. It would work, she was convinced. She wouldn't have to resonate with them to make him a Death Scythe; her raw skills should be enough.

But for someone who always appeared so distant and offhanded, she learned that he had always been so uncharacteristically thorough when it came to bandaging her wounds. Their first twenty or so souls were easy enough that she managed to get away with insisting on caring for her own injuries, but once they stepped into the deeper numbers, she sometimes found herself waking up fully bandaged in her bed with the morning sun grinning devilishly outside her window and only a hazy recollection of the previous night. She assumed it was something they taught in weapons-only courses at the academy; she'd sat through the entirety of one once and was considerably surprised to hear the amount of times the meister's safety was stressed. That was it, she'd thought, he had only been doing it because he had to. But then, as she looked herself over each of those mornings, she couldn't find even a single trace of careless work that was associated with his kind of lazy personality—everything was covered and wrapped to a caliber even she could call perfection.

They had just hit forty-two when their soul collecting became an uphill battle. With their enemies becoming increasingly tougher, she'd grown accustomed to having him take out the bandages in the aftermath of each fight and wrapping her up as needed. He'd always do so without words or open emotion, but she could _feel_ it, unmistakably, in his wavelength. It was around that time when it dawned on her how gentle—she'd call it loving, if she hadn't known any better of her chronically twisted partner—he would be whenever he brought it upon himself to heal her wounds. She had stopped insisting on bandaging herself when she realized that her partner—this dark, broody, sharktoothed boy who was a little too obsessed with being cool—truly and genuinely cared for her. And slowly but surely, she stopped shying away to read on her own, she stopped closing the door to her room at the apartment they were supposed to share. She remembered how it felt like to have open doors in her home again, and whatever wounds the past may have inflicted on her were healing thanks to his bandages.

When they faced off against the pumpkin witch for their hundredth soul, she felt all of the faith and trust she'd put into him crash and shatter like glass. And, if only for that moment, she hated him—hated him for lying, hated him for betraying her, hated him for the fact that he was supposed to be the sole exception to her belief that all men were demons. Maybe she had been right all along, and she was a fool for thinking otherwise and going against her beliefs; she'd witnessed it firsthand so many times before, hadn't she?—the intolerable nature of men; their cheating, lying, hurting ways—

_But cool men don't cheat on their partners, do they?_

She finds it laughable, nowadays. Looking back on it all, she almost can't believe that she had even doubted him in the first place—him, her weapon who would give up his life in a heartbeat to keep her safe; him, her partner who would follow her to the depths of Hell if it meant staying loyal; him, the one who would always give her a shoulder to cry on, who would always find a way into her heart even when she'd shut it closed, who would always be ready with a roll of bandages to treat her wounds. He was a Death Scythe now, the best of his kind, and he'd reached that title thanks to both of their efforts combined. These days, his name rolls off her tongue without so much as a thought. Soul.

Today, she's no longer a little girl, and the threads of her past have long been unraveled. The windows are open in their apartment, and the wind breezes through them with the faintest scent of summer. The sun is smiling delicately, the sky is painted with deep reds and oranges and glossed over in a buttery yellow. She moves her head upside-down against the couch's armrest as she watches the clouds stroll lazily by. She pulls the ribbons from her hair, mindful to move as little as possible so as to avoid any potential reprimands from her overprotective partner, and lets it fall noiselessly over the edge like a flush of ash-blonde silk. She closes her eyes, remembering, thinking, dreaming.

They had both done it together. They really had become the best team the world had ever known, linked perfectly in soul and mind. Her mother would be proud, she muses, though the notion slips away when she hears his footsteps, along with the quiet rattling of a first-aid kit, as he approaches her on the couch. As she shakes herself from her thoughts, her arm moves to push herself upright to a seated position, all the while nodding airily at his reminders to not strain herself. He takes a seat on the cushion beside her, and she feels his warmth as his fingers move over her skin, smiling at his caring touch.

He lifts her arm up and holds her wrist in the palm of his hand. She winces a bit when he applies the antiseptic to the cut on her forearm where a kishin's claw had struck, and she playfully pushes his head away when he laughs at her futile attempts to stay strong even in the face of her new worst enemy (now going by the name of hydrogen peroxide). Their voices fall still as he reaches for the bandages and wraps them tautly around her wound; with him so focused on treating her, she takes the opportunity to look him over just once, his spiky silver hair and tanned skin the most familiar of looks to her now. She recalls all that they've been through together, all that they've strived for.

She's glad she met him, and even with his demented, twisted demeanor, his tendency to nearly burn down their apartment with every attempt to cook, and the bookworm jokes that she'd really rather live without, the fact stood that they had accomplished what her parents couldn't—and she wouldn't trade him for the world. Not when she finally had someone to bandage her wounds for her, and especially not when he depended on her to bandage his own.

* * *

_March 28, 2014_


End file.
